What is an Autoresponder?

Image via CrunchBase

An autoresponder is essentially the automatic series of emails that get sent out to people that subscribe to your mailing list. This is a massively important part of marketing online, an autoresponder allows you to create a trusting connection with your list. Building this trust means they are more likely to respect your suggestions, and therefore means if you suggest a product they will be more likely to buy it.

If you don't yet have a list of email subscribers it's easily one of the biggest and easiest improvements you can make to your business because when someone comes to your website they can sign up for updates whether they are a free visitor or a paid buyer and get notified about new content and new offers you have for them. You need an autoresponder service.

My favorite autoresponder service for starting out is Get Response. The reason for that is because you can send an unlimited number of emails, the emails get sent on time and you have many different options including broadcast, timed broadcast, follow-ups, you can easily manage your subscribers and it is free for lists under 100 people.

What does it mean to be able to send an unlimited number of emails? There were some email services such as iContact that have very good deliverability and a very good interface but you are limited to only sending out six email messages to your subscribers every month.

That means if you have a busy week and happen to launch a product that week and send six emails that week then you can't send anymore messages to your subscribers for the rest of the entire month. That's why even though there are some autoresponder companies with better deliverability than Get Response, I don't like them because you are limited in how many emails you send every month.

Another thing to check out is do the emails get sent out on time? Read the user reviews around the Internet of the autoresponder service you're looking at and find out if when it comes time to blast or broadcast a message to your subscribers, it will get sent right away.

You will also want to make sure that the service you are interested in provides you with everything you need. You need to be able to delete people from you list and create sub lists if needs be. You need to be able to set up an autoresponder (follow up messages) and also do broadcasts (messages that send to everyone at the same time).